The good news for Rossi, and bad for Gregoire, is that only 48 percent of the 405 voters who were queried Jan. 3-6 said they definitely or probably would vote for Gregoire. Scoring below 50 percent in a danger sign for an incumbent. On the other hand, 51 percent rated the governor’s overall job performance as “excellent” or “good.”

The good news for Gregoire is that while she defeated Rossi by only 133 votes in the 2004 election, she now has a 13-percentage-point lead over him in voter preference. Only 35 percent of the respondents said they definitely or probably are inclined to vote for Rossi. Eighteen percent said they were undecided. The margin of error was 5 percent.

Elway writes in The Elway Poll that Rossi’s 35 percent is the “Republican bedrock number,” below the proportions of the vote attained by Republican candidates John Carlson and Ellen Craswell when they were defeated by landslide margins by Democratic Gov. Gary Locke in 2000 and 1996, respectively.

Gregoire led among almost every demographic category in the poll. Rossi, however, was favored by independent voters, 41 percent to 32 percent; Eastern Washington voters, 44 percent to 37 percent, and voters older than 65, 40 percent to 39 percent, which was within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent.

Gregoire’s strongest bases of support were among Democrats, 86 percent; in Seattle, 76 percent; the public sector, 58 percent, and baby boomers, 56 percent.

UPDATE

J. Vander Stoep, a Rossi campaign strategist, questioned the findings of the Elway poll after comparing them with a gubernatorial race survey by The Washington Poll, conducted by University of Washington researchers Oct. 22-28. He suggested that Elway might have included too high a proportion of self-identified Democrats in his poll.

The UW poll showed Gregoire 11 points higher than the Elway poll among independent voters and 9 points higher among seniors when pitted against Rossi, Vander Stoep noted. Yet Elway’s poll had her with a wider lead than than the Washington Poll, which showed Gregoire favored by 46.8 percent and Rossi by 42.4 percent of the voters.

Differences in phrasing of questions, sizes of the two surveys’ samplings and other methodology factors could account for some of the variations. But Vander Stoep argued, “The objective point is that (Elway’s) data has (Gregoire) dropping 11 points among independents and 9 points among seniors … and yet she has the same percentage among Democrats, and you can’t have all three of those happening at the same time and have the lead widening for her.”